Integrating Curriculum, NY

Integrating Curriculum, NY

Integrating curriculum is important in the teaching of subjects and the learning of material. The integrating of curriculum allows for many different disciplines to be applied at the same time yielding more topics to be learned at once. But how does it work? The point of this paper is to answer the question how and to shed some light on the ideas of integrated curriculum.

In the integration of curriculum, teachers teach more than one subject area at the same time. Any number of disciplines can be taught together. Science lessons can be integrated with math lessons and language arts lessons by finding common areas in which all three tie together. For example, if a teacher would like to teach a lesson on ecosystems, he or she might have the students write in journals as a form of language arts, graph data collected and estimate to have math as part of their lesson, and do an experiment for the science portion.

According to Fogarty (1991), there are 10 models of curriculum integration which are fragmented, connected, nested, sequenced, shared, webbed, threaded, integrated, immersed, and networked. These models range in options from integrating one subject to many subjects in the mind of the student. Fragmented curriculum focuses on the traditional model of teaching separate and distinct disciplines, which fragments the subject areas. Connected curriculum connects subject areas by topic, concept, the relations of ideas, and one year’s work to the next. Nested curriculum targets different skills,such as social skills, thinking skills, and content-specific skills, within each subject. In a sequenced curriculum, topics or units are rearranged to coincide with each other. In a shared curriculum, shared ...

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...n has taught Elementary school in Chicago, where strict integration guidelines were enforced. The school district provided the teacher with activities, resources, and regulations needed to combine subject matter. The problem is not all regions/school districts provide these materials, which forces the teacher to integrate curricula on her/his own. This can be extremely difficult for the teacher.

These ideas are being taught to would-be-teachers in colleges across the nation. Shifts taking place in Education today stress combining curricula and move away from departmentalizing subject matter, as taught in the past. Isolation of the subjects does not allow learners to see the connections and relationships between the subject and the real world. Teachers are collaborating with other teachers to enrich learning and create more well-rounded learners and better students.